copper plates Monday, Mar 10 2008 

16th Century sarah917 3:44 pm

minor research, major discovery. apparently, not all was done through woodcuts, which represented a durable way to make picture after picture after picture. instead, in the timeless showdown between quality and quantity, pictures like the Melancolia and other, more sculptural images were engraved on copper plates. The copper plate could only make a dozen or so prints (which explains why i was not handed a copper plate in the conservation room of the gallery 10 years ago), but the softness of the metal allowed the detail and texture Durer presents. compare: jews of nuremberg wood cut

This picture, from Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle of Nuremberg (1493) is not too much older than Durer’s Melencolia I (1514), and the two are especially interesting to compare since Durer was from Nuremberg as well. But essentially, the 1493 picture is so much more medieval, lacking not only the sculptural depth of Durer’s later copper plate engraving, but displaying a common medieval convention of representing human beings as parts and types (note all the heads crowded together–where are their bodies?). This isn’t to say that Melencolia isn’t a type as well; much scholarship before, after, and including Panofsky has made much of the symbolic language contained within this picture, a very medieval sort of custom which continued strong into the Renaissance, with books of emblems that had specific meanings from “geometry” to “abstract thought.” And certainly the person in Durer’s picture is not a real person, but at most specific the diety Melecolia, a daughter of Cronus who was called Sloth prior to the Renaissance (! Well, it’s true that depressives don’t have much get-up-and-go.) To the modern eye, though, the woodcut of the Jews of Nuremberg looks ancient, and removed from reality, and we’re not surprised if it was not modeled from life. But Durer somehow looks modern, as lifelike as a carved copper plate can be, brimming with knowledge about mathematics and technology and modernity. One of the things I’m endlessly entertained by in art history is that every era’s historians after 1200 or so claim that the art they study represents the birth of the modern. But I think Durer is right on the cusp. I wonder if he would have been as dexterous with pixels.

 

woodcuts Monday, Mar 10 2008 

16th Century sarah917 2:31 pm

Durer Melancholia woodcut

so one of the challenges of woodcuts–posting about them, looking at them, trying to wrap one’s head around how they are even made–is that they are so unbelievably detailed, in a sculptural way that is unexpected even after studying them for years. once, maybe 10 years ago, an art professor took us on a field trip to the conservation room of a gallery in baltimore, and the conservationist casually handed me the block of wood that Durer had used to make one of his prints. i stopped breathing for a moment and was overwhelmed by such a tangible connection to history, but i’m sad to say that i don’t remember looking too closely at the wood block, or even which print it became. it was red, i remember that, and i wondered if it were red paint, or wax, or some preservative. i didn’t ask, probably because i couldn’t breathe. i guess i’m more reverent about art than about the religious iconography it depicts.

what else, what else? i haven’t though critically about art in a few years. sharp knives, i guess, you’d have to have to make wood cuts. i’m curious to know the connection between “high art” woodcuts and ” folk art” whittling. Durer was German, and I know it’s a heck of a leap to connect him with little whittled animals and nativities at the Christkindlmarkt. i’m going to research that.

anyway, this picture was in my 10th grad algebra book, maybe with something about the matrix above the guy’s head. at the time, i wished i could study more about the picture and not learn about matrices. so now is the time to start.